8 COMMENTS

Guest access is a key differentiator between the 2 products:
For Teams, guest access relies on the guest participant having a O365 Work or School account, it is driven by Azure AD, so you cannot, for example just add a guest based on a generic email address. With Spark, anyone can be added as a guest based on an email address, and guests can sign up without a subscription.

Also consider, when a guest is added to Teams, the guest is added to that company’s AAD as a guest, meaning that if you are a guest into multiple organizations Teams environment, you will have context switching and multiple logging in activities. Does adding guests into your AAD mean you have to pay for them too ??

In Cisco Spark, your identity is central and you can be in multiple organizations Spark Rooms with a single log-in, regardless of if you are an organization member or guest.

Other things of note you can add to your list for Spark –
Whiteboarding – including link between virtual and physical devices (e.g. Spark Board)
Proximity integration, for both mobile voice and content sharing
@Spark – automated Spark room set up from calendar invites, just add @Spark in the meeting location and all the attendees will be invited into a newly created Spark room
Spark Care – Customer Contact
Swipe calls between devices – e.g. Start a Spark call on your mobile, walk to a meeting room and simply swipe the call onto the SparkBoard without interruption to the call

Your Teams description is only a part of the story. To understand the what/why of where they are headed and how it’s happening so fast, your readers need to understand that the UC team at Microsoft is porting many features from Skype for Business to Teams. The core code exists, and it’s all hands on deck moving items over. So, when you say it’s not a viable PBX replacement, just give it a couple of days and it might be! 🙂 Being 100% cloud based also eases development and allows Microsoft to turn on new features much faster than on-prem or hybrid deployments.

What REALLY excites me about Teams are the vast array of endpoints that are moving over from Skype. The Smartdocks from Logitech/Polycom/Crestron/etc are all fascinating, but the Surface Hub is the crown jewel of collaboration boards. The Skype experience is good on the Hubs, but they’ve halted development of that in favor of Teams. The Hub is large Windows10 device and Teams is being built as an app. So, the Teams app will be developed independently of Win10 and features and updates will be released on their own schedule instead of patch Tuesday.

The roadmap is great for Teams agreed. But right now buyers need to distinguish between availability and capability. We use Teams in house and without the Skype for Business Online element it would be a pretty poor PBX replacement. Even SfB online (Office 365 edition) isn’t a great PBX, it lacks so many basic features that businesses have come to expect from a telephone system. Hopefully Microsoft will code all the Skype for Business Server Edition features in soon and customers will have a great solution.

Cisco is investing $1M in Adelaide, AU to reduce traffic congestion and pave a path for autonomous vehicles (TechRepublic) The city of Adelaide is in the midst of a smart city pilot program with Cisco that is intended to cut down on traffic delays through the use of tailored algorithms.